2.9.5 Direct connection with Kerberos

The easiest way to use Kerberos is to use the Kerberos rsh, as described in Connecting with rsh. The main disadvantage of using rsh is that all the data needs to pass through additional programs, so it may be slower. So if you have Kerberos installed you can connect via a direct TCP connection, authenticating with Kerberos.

This section concerns the Kerberos network security system, version 4. Kerberos version 5 is supported via the GSSAPI generic network security interface, as described in the previous section.

To do this, CVS needs to be compiled with Kerberos support; when configuring CVS it tries to detect whether Kerberos is present or you can use the ‘--with-krb4’ flag to configure.

The data transmitted is not encrypted by default. Encryption support must be compiled into both the client and server; use the ‘--enable-encryption’ configure option to turn it on. You must then use the -x global option to request encryption.

You need to edit ‘inetd.conf’ on the server machine to run cvs kserver. The client uses port 1999 by default; if you want to use another port specify it in the CVSROOT (see section Remote repositories) or the CVS_CLIENT_PORT environment variable (see section All environment variables which affect CVS) on the client.

When you want to use CVS, get a ticket in the usual way (generally kinit); it must be a ticket which allows you to log into the server machine. Then you are ready to go:

cvs -d :kserver:faun.example.org:/usr/local/cvsroot checkout foo

Previous versions of CVS would fall back to a connection via rsh; this version will not do so.